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Reform Judaism: In 1000 Words
Torah: Authorship and Authority
Context
One of the great challenges of religious life is how we engage with our foundational texts, how we find
meaning and truth (or truths) in our textual heritage. Parts of these may draw us in, but they may also utterly
repel us. Struggle and discussion with the text has, of course, been part of the Jewish conversation for
thousands of years, and Reform Jews are not the first to both love and wrestle with Torah. However, an aspect
of this struggle which is (relatively) new to modernity is the question of authorship and authority – who wrote
the texts, and where does their ‘power’ over us come from?
As Rabbi Josh Levy, Rabbinic Partner at Alyth (North Western Reform Synagogue), writes below, when we
recognise that this collection of texts was written by our ancestors, in their grappling with the world around
them, this allows us to live with intellectual integrity, but also presents us with religious challenges, too.
Content
A great deal of the content of the Torah is wonderful: fascinating, challenging narratives; powerful pieces of
ethical exhortation; inspiring laws: as relevant today as when they were written.
Much of it is wonderful, but certainly not all.
Some of it is mundane, uninspiring and tedious. Worse, some passages in Torah express values and ideals so
repugnant that they are, in the words of 20 th Century British Rabbi John Rayner, “so plainly human… that to
hold God responsible for them is a ‘profanation of God’s name’ i.
So what to do with Torah? How do we understand the stories it contains – good and bad? How do we relate
to those sections that tell us what to do, many of which are long way from our own ethical instincts? How do
we cope with the fact that much of it is just so ugly?
The classical Jewish position tells us that we can’t distinguish between parts of Torah at all. The work is to be
treated as a unity, all of it with the same status, because it is a unity with a very special author – God.
The classical Jewish position understands that there is a God, who cares how we behave, and chose to
communicate divine will for us through the means of revelation of Torah – given at one moment in time, but
of eternal truth. The Torah, we are told by Moses Maimonides, the great Spanish Jewish scholar of the Middle
Ages was “given to us from Moses Our Teacher entirely from the mouth of the Almighty… he [Moses] was like
a scribe taking dictation.”ii
This model, known as “Torah min HaShamayim” (Torah from heaven) or as “Torah l’Moshe mi-Sinai” (the Law
of Moses from Sinai) presents a position in which every story should be read as ‘true’ and every law as binding
– for all of them come directly from God. In this model, the primary human exercise is to engage with the text
– to engage in interpretation of this core work to understand what the law means, to find out how best to
meet divine will.
It is a model that has produced some of the most beautiful literature in the world, in the form of the Talmud
and Midrash. These are the product of an obsession with, love of, the text. And they are clever, and often
inspiring works. As as a method of reading our texts for modern times, Torah min HaShamayim is deeply
flawed. For one thing, it requires us to start with authorship rather than starting with the text itself – in fact,
asking that we ignore many features of the text itself. When we start with the text itself, we see that it is not
a unity but a collection of documents woven together. When we start with the text itself, we see that the
authorship must be in question.
Equally challenging is that this model demands full buy in. It allows little room for differentiation between
passages, little scope for different understandings of divine presence in the world – or the text. If one biblical
instruction is a binding statement of divine will by virtue of its authorship, then the same must necessarily
true of the next commandment in the list, however abhorrent we may find it. When we approach Torah in
this way we give it the ultimate authority for our world view. As the Orthodox thinker Joseph Soloveitchik
wrote of ‘Halakhic Man’: “he comes with his Torah, given to him from Sinai, in hand. He orients himself to the
world by means of fixed statutes and firm principles”iii.
Torah min HaShamayim therefore does not give us a mechanism for privileging, for example, that which is
ethical in Torah: that which is about care for those for whom we are responsible; about lending graciously to
the poor; about being just and fair to all; about giving our best in the service of God. It gives no way of
privileging those over, for example, the law that a man who seduces a virgin must make her his wife by
payment of a bride-price to her father. Torah min-HaShamayim does not allow us to identify one as
representing divine will while the other is a law which must be seen as a product of its time.
So what of Reform Judaism and Torah? What replaces Torah min HaShamayim for us?
We believe that the Torah is a human creation – written by our ancestors and inspired by their understanding
of themselves and the place of God in their lives – so ‘divine’ in one sense, but utterly human. This has some
great advantages. For starters, the proposition that the Torah was created by human beings, and then edited
together by other human beings, is almost definitely true. This position does not require us to ignore the
evidence in front of our eyes, to be led by the theology rather than the text itself. It is not intellectually
dishonest. Recognition of the human origin of Torah also allows exactly the sort of differentiation between
texts that Torah min-HaShamayim cannot accommodate. We can say that some laws have ‘eternal truth’
while others are a product of their time. The fundamental Jewish exercise is therefore very different – to
engage with the text (and the world) to try to find that which we can call ‘sacred’.
The rejection of Torah min HaShamayim, though, leaves a massive challenge. If the Torah is a human book,
why give it any special importance in our lives? Why read it in synagogue? Why attach any more significance
to Torah than to Shakespeare, or the Beano? This is a real challenge, but one with an answer:
For many of us, questions of authorship – or, indeed, of historicity – are irrelevant to our relationship with
Torah. This is our people’s story, our literature, our poetry, our law. This is the formative stuff of our religious
and cultural lives. The relationship with Torah is a deeply intimate, and particularistic one because it is ours.
Like all good relationships, for Reform Jews it can be a critical relationship, too.
Contemplation
The human origin of the text, and our ongoing human engagement with it, are not negatives. They form the
bedrock of our Judaism. The Torah may (if we allow it to) reinforce prejudices and certainly will need arguing
with, but it also provides the foundational material of our tradition, presents us with beauty and truth, and
gives us sometimes radical ways of thinking about our lives, our communities and our world.
The challenge for us, as modern Jews, is to allow ourselves to both challenge and be challenged by the text, to
find the beauty and ugliness of ourselves in it, and allowing it to be within us. What, though, are the
boundaries of legitimate reading? How can we find truth (Truth?) in human texts from such a different time
and place?
i
John D. Rayner, “Jewish Religious Law- A Progressive Perspective” Oxford: Berghahn Books. 1998 p.65
Found within Maimonides 13 Principles of faith (number 8) in his commentary on Mishnah Sanhedrin
iii
Joseph Soloveitchik “Halakhic Man” New York: The Jewish Publication Society. 1983 p.19
ii
Edited by Rabbi Josh Levy and
Rabbi Debbie Young-Somers, who also
wrote the Context and Contemplation
sections.